SOPHIA (2010) 49:523534

DOI 10.1007/s11841-010-0216-2

Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks

John Bishop

Published online: 8 December 2010

# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract Some atheists are attracted to the idea of a secular spirituality that carries
no commitment to the existence of God or anything similar. Is this a coherent
possibility? This paper seeks to define what we mean by a spirituality by
examining Robert C. Solomons defence of spirituality for the religious skeptic, and
pursues the question of its coherence by reflecting on what is implied by taking
thankfulness to be a proper response to our existence.
Keywords Spirituality . Naturalism . Atheism . Gratitude . Trust . Concepts of God .
Richard Dawkins . Robert C. Solomon

Introduction: The Thankfulness of an Atheist

I heard Richard Dawkins lecture in Auckland recently.1 His skill as a clear and
engaging expositor of Darwinian evolutionary theory was evident, but he also
conveyed his passion for the evolutionary worldview. And he had a message: our
own existence is something for which we should give thanks! Once life appears in its
simplest forms, it is entirely predictable that there will be some development of
increasingly complex organisms well adapted to their environment. But the fact that
we are amongst what has evolved depends on such a vast sequence of contingencies
improbabilities piled upon improbabilities that we cannot but wonder at the sheer
gratuitousness of our existence. Of course, Dawkins made it clear that he does not
believe there is anyone or anything to whom gratitude for the gift of our existence is
due. But there was no mistaking his view that this sense of gratitude is a proper
stance for an evolutionary naturalist to take.

1
Under the auspices of the University of Auckland Alumni Association, on his way through Auckland
after Writers and Readers Week at the Wellington Arts Festival (Saturday, 13 March, 2010).

J. Bishop (*)
Department of Philosophy, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142,
New Zealand
e-mail: jc.bishop@auckland.ac.nz

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The atheism for which Dawkins has become a leading public apologist is,
sociologically speaking, quite a religious form of atheism. This may be confirmed by
an inspection of his official website,2 which includes a Converts Corner where
people witness to their escape from religion and express their thanks to Dawkins for
his part in their emancipation. At the lecture in Auckland, too, I was struck by the
spontaneous applause that greeted Dawkins as soon as he emerged onto the stage and
it was clear that a standing ovation at the end was de rigueur: one had the feeling that
no matter what Dawkins actually said, the presence of the man himself needed special
acclaim. Dawkins has become a symbolic person, a kind of small-scale atheist Pope.
One may suspect that Dawkins himself is not wholly comfortable with this aspect of
his public role. Yet I think he does take evolutionary naturalism to be a spiritually
wholesome worldview, by contrast with that of the theist religions. I recently saw a
videoclip of Dawkins with Polly Toynbee being interviewed at the start of the British
Humanist Associations bus advertising campaign (Theres probably no God. Now
stop worrying and enjoy your life!). Dawkins expressed distaste at the standardly
linked adjectives that the description atheist attracts: he does not, for example,
appreciate being regarded as a strident atheist. And Polly Toynbee made the point that
people unfairly assume that atheists are not spiritual people. So there may be room for
an interpretation of Dawkins as standing in the long tradition of atheists motivated by
the desire to reject a supposedly flawed spirituality in favour of an improved one.
This is a long tradition that belongs as much within the theistic religious traditions
as anywhere else: caution towards inherited understandings of the divine is entailed
by the imperative to avoid idolatry. Dawkins atheism is especially annoying because
it ignores this important point. The outright atheism he professes simply does not
follow from Dawkins rejection of the kind of God he does reject roughly, a God
whose existence would provide an ultimate explanation for the existence and
characteristics of the Universe, where that explanation operates along the same
explanatory dimension as natural scientific explanations. Mark Johnston classifies
Dawkins, along with Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, as an undergraduate
atheist (Johnston 2009, p. 38). And, indeed, Dawkins arguments for atheism or,
more accurately, his objections to arguments for theism do seem, at best, to be
those of someone who has recently read and been impressed by Humes Dialogues
Concerning Natural Religion.
No doubt one should be impressed by Humes critique of natural theology not
to mention his deployment of the Argument from Evil. But the point is that a
significant number of reflective theists entirely agree with Hume and Dawkins in
rejecting a theism for which the claim that God exists functions as a high-level
hypothesis potentially competing with scientific theories such as Darwinian
evolution. So Dawkins argues from a position of theological navet which makes
the confidence with which he affirms his outright atheism somewhat exasperating.
Terry Eagleton, recalling the Thomist theology he acquired as a Cambridge
undergraduate, expresses this exasperation well:
The so-called new theology I stumbled upon at the age of eighteen or so, with
the aid of a few maverick Dominicans and rather more pints of bitter, was not
2

http://richarddawkins.net/

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in fact new at all. It was new only to the likes of callow young papists like
myself. It did not see God the Creator as some kind of mega-manufacturer or
cosmic chief executive officer, as the Richard Dawkins school of nineteenthcentury liberal rationalism likes to imagine what the theologian Herbert
McCabe calls the idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful
creature. Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the
universe to science. Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the
Spell, he [Dawkins] thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation
of the world. In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that a novel is
a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore cannot see the point of it at all.
(Eagleton 2009, p. 6)3
There are plenty of theists, then, who will wish to say to Dawkins that they too
are atheists, relative to the God that Dawkins rejects. As is common with passionate
atheists, Dawkins is protective of the God in whom he does not believe and this
expresses itself in impatience with theologians of this stripe. Apparently, Dawkins is
seized with the idea that his undergraduate atheism reveals the poverty even the
perversity of the theistic religious traditions generally, and it is understandable that
someone with that Gestalt will lack any motivation to be open to, let alone search
for, the pearls of great price in the theistic traditions.
Which is a pity, especially in the light of Dawkins own message about thankfulness
as a proper response to an evolutionary naturalist understanding of our existence. For
this gives Dawkins something profoundly in common with the theistic traditions, for
whom it is meet and right, always and everywhere, to give our thanks and praise. Yes, I
confess I am tempted to speak of Dawkins eucharistic turn! But the point is a serious
one: Dawkins view that giving thanks is a proper response to recognising our
dependence on natural evolutionary processes places him along with theists on the
same side of an important divide between those who think thankfulness a wellfounded response to existence, and those who consider it absurd or pointless.
So a more philosophical Dawkins would engage with theologians who share his
atheism, in the expectation of fruitful mutual challenge. On the one hand, those
theologians may challenge him with the claim that it is only from within a theistic
perspective (purged of the false God Dawkins rightly rejects) that the aptness of
existential gratitude can be defended. On the other hand, a more philosophical Dawkins
may challenge theologians who endorse his atheism to clarify their positive conception
of God, or if they take the apophatic route to defend the distinctiveness of a theistic
worldview focussed on a God describable only in terms of what it is not. So, for example,
to go back to Eagletons charge that Dawkins is mistaken in assuming that Christianity
offers a rival view of the universe to science, theologians will need to explain just how
theism does relate to our natural scientific understanding of the world. Surely the
theistic traditions do suppose that Gods existence is explanatory indeed that Gods
existence and nature provide an ultimacy in explanation than which nothing more
ultimate can be conceived? If the ultimate explanation offered by theism is not along
the same explanatory dimension as any natural scientific explanation, just what sort of
an explanation is it? (And this I hasten to add is no merely rhetorical question.)
3

The enclosed quotation is from McCabe 2007, p.76. The reference to Dennett is to Dennett 2007.

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I believe, then, that it is correct to interpret Dawkins not just as outrightly

opposing theistic religion but as positively recommending a spirituality with
evolutionary consciousness at its core. Such a spirituality will have to count as a
secular or naturalised spirituality. In this paper, I shall consider (or, at least, begin
to consider) how a more philosophical Dawkins might explore the possibility of such
a spirituality: how might a naturalist spirituality be formulated as something
deserving of the name yet clearly distinct from theistic spirituality?

The Possibility of Naturalist Spirituality

Many philosophers regard spirituality with suspicion, as a new age invention for the
weak-minded who remain nostalgic for the religious worldview they have rejected. Is
such a prejudice justified? Or may the notion of spirituality be rendered both workably
precise and philosophically useful? Some humanist and atheist philosophers who, in
common with Dawkins, seek acknowledgment for what they are trying to build up,
rather than for what they want to tear down, may hope that a philosophical inquiry into
spirituality will vindicate atheist humanism as a viable spirituality. Some theist
philosophers, too, may be interested in the possibility of a naturalist spirituality
especially if they reject a sharp ontological divide between the natural and the
supernatural. For some theists, authentic theistic spirituality is also a naturalist and a
humanist spirituality. There are revisionary (or are they in fact authentically classical?)
theists who find inadequate the personal omniGod conception of the divine that has
become standard in analytical philosophy of religion.4 True theistic spirituality is, for
them, relatively an atheist spirituality relative, that is, to the personal omniGod
conception of the divine. Such theists will be fascinated to see how philosophers who
claim wholly to reject the theistic traditions attempt to work out and affirm a secular or
naturalised spirituality. They will be interested to find out what distance remains, in
the end, between a theist who seeks to make sense of theism without the personal
omniGod, and an atheist who claims to retain a genuine spirituality.
One philosopher who develops and defends a naturalist or secular spirituality is
Robert C. Solomon, in his book Spirituality for the Skeptic (2002). Solomon says
this: spirituality means to me the grand and thoughtful passions of life, and a life
lived in accordance with those grand thoughts and passions (2002, p. 6). He
includes amongst these grand and thoughtful passions love, trust, reverence and
gratitude the thankfulness that Dawkins emphasises.
To understand what Solomon has in mind, let us consider one of his examples
trust, which, importantly, he further characterises as cosmic trust, trust in the world.
Here is some of what he says about trust as a spiritual passion:
Cultivated trust is an essential part of spirituality. But spirituality should not be
confused with [a] self-confidence that is limited to confidence in ones abilities
and skills for making ones way in the world. Trust in the world includes the
Richard Swinburnes definition of God typifies this conception, when he says that God is [a] person
without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good,
is the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the Universe
(Swinburne 1993, p. 1).

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acceptance of a lack of control and the recognition of ones vulnerability.

we cultivate trust even in face of our recognition that a perfect or even a best
possible world is impossible. (2002, p.46)
spirituality is the continuing trust and insistence that the world is benign
and life is meaningful, that the world is not out to get you, and that the
defensive measures of distrust and paranoia are unnecessary and selfdestructive. (2002, p.51)
Solomons Notion of Spirituality
Solomons philosophical style is not especially analytical. It may nevertheless be
instructive to take a (moderately) analytical approach to his account of spirituality,
and try to work out what it is for a person to possess a Solomonian spiritual passion.
That, anyway, is what I shall now attempt to do.
First, a person with a spiritual passion will have a certain sort of emotionally
laden propositional attitude for example, the attitude that the world is
fundamentally benign. This attitude may amount to (or include) belief, but it need
not do so. For, insofar as belief entails intellectual assent, it seems one could have
the feeling that the world was fundamentally benign, while nevertheless not
believing this to be the case. Having an attitude of cosmic trust might, in other
words, be merely pathological. Finding oneself visited by the sense that the world is
benign and life is meaningful will not, however, be sufficient for possessing the
spirituality of cosmic trust.
To possess a spirituality of cosmic trust, a second requirement will be a higher
order attitude of approving and welcoming ones feeling that the world is
fundamentally benign. Presumably, one might find it embarrassing to be visited by
the sense that the world is fundamentally benign one might be ashamed at feeling
this way, regarding such a feeling as an indication of insufferably bourgeois
smugness. Such a negative higher-order attitude, clearly, will close off spirituality
or, at least, this spirituality. It is thus important to recognise that the propositional
attitudes that present themselves as options for spirituality are open to ethical
evaluation. Though Solomon himself employs the term spirituality so that having
spirituality is good per se, in fact the possibility of bad, worthless, or perverse,
spirituality needs to be accommodated. My attention here is on what it is for a person
to possess something that counts as a spirituality: it will be a further matter to
determine what it is for a spirituality to be ethically acceptable. If good sense may be
made of the notion of a persons having a spirituality, then it will turn out that a
completed Ethics will need to determine not only right action, right character, right
feeling, and right relationship, but also right spirituality.
A third requirement for possessing spirituality will be specifiable by determining
just what kind of emotionally laden propositional attitudes count as options for
spirituality. Solomon describes spiritual passions as grand an indication that their
cognitive content has grand or wide scope, perhaps the widest possible scope. So a
feeling of trust will not be a spiritual feeling if the attitude is restricted to particular
aspects of the world for example, a feeling that at least ones parents are not out to
get one. A belief could have truly cosmic scope so far as its content was concerned,

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and yet quite clearly not be a candidate for a spiritual passion, however. Consider,
for example, the attitude that the Universe is expanding. Whats missing? The
emotional loading perhaps. But will that attitude become a spiritual one if I am
moved greatly moved, perhaps by the expansion of the Universe? No, that does
not seem right. What is needed, I think, is to specify that the content of a candidate
spiritual attitude of mine must concern how things are in a respect that is germane to
the style of my overall relation to and engagement with reality. A spiritual attitude
has to be one such that, if I adopt it if I take up the stance on reality that it offers
me my having it will make a difference to how I act, and the kind of life that I lead.
But it must make a global difference: that is, adopting a spiritual stance must make a
difference by framing in a particular way my whole experience of being in and
engaging with the world.
So a further, fourth, condition on possessing a spirituality now emerges. One must
not only have a spiritual passion, one must own or adopt it, by taking its cognitive
content to be true. Being spiritual essentially involves practical commitment to a
certain overall view of the world. Spirituality is not only a matter of having certain
grand and thoughtful passions, it is a life lived in accordance with those grand
thoughts and passions (Solomon 2002, p. 6).5
What is it to commit oneself in practice to the fundamental trustworthiness of the
world (to continue with our example)? A standard decision theoretic approach does
not fit well here. On that standard view, it is clear enough what practical
commitment to the proposition that some particular person will prove trustworthy
in some particular context amounts to: I give the truth of that claim a certain
credence, and employ that estimate of the probability of its truth in my calculations
of expected utility so, for example, with enough at stake, I might reasonably trust
someone in whose trustworthiness I have a relatively low degree of belief. But my
taking the world to be fundamentally benign is hardly going to feature in any
decision theoretic calculations: rather than being a factor in some particular episode
of practical reasoning, it seems instead to function as a constant background that
frames all my practical reasoning. But how exactly does it make a practical
difference, then?
A clue may be found in Solomons observing that someone with cosmic trust
spirituality recognises that the defensive measures of distrust and paranoia are
unnecessary and self-destructive (2002, p. 51). This spirituality makes a practical
difference by blocking what might otherwise be motivationally powerful influences:
because it takes the stance that the world is to be trusted, any naturally arising
feelings to the contrary will thereby count as mistaken, illusory, deceptive, and so
far as this is possible to be consciously repudiated. Paranoid thoughts and feelings
no doubt will arise; but, resolved on ones spiritual stance of cosmic trust, these may
be consciously put to one side indeed, one may find ways of gradually reducing
the habits of defensiveness and cultivating the habit of trust. Perhaps, then, the way
to understand in general how adopting a spirituality makes a practical difference is to
5

One might possibly have a spiritual passion, and approve of it, and yet not actually commit in practice to
its specific stance on reality. That would count as a failure akin to weakness of will, I suggest, since
approving of ones feeling that (for example) the world is fundamentally benign must surely motivate one
to live a life that takes it indeed to be so.

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see it as determining which amongst the many and conflicting motivations that
influence our decisions and actions are to be endorsed and encouraged, and which
rejected and (so far as possible) removed.6
Possessing a spirituality, then, seems to amount to practical commitment to a
global attitude to the world that frames my whole way of living, my actions and my
ways of relating to myself and all others, and that has its effect by confirming some
of my motivations and repudiating and neutralising others. Furthermore, I must
judge my spiritual attitude to be ethically admirable whether it is actually so is a
separate matter, but at least I must think it so. (So, while it is important that we make
room for someones possessing a spirituality that is less than ethically admirable, the
notion of spirituality is the notion of something that aims at the good.)
Here is a fifth feature that is arguably required for possessing a spirituality. In
taking a particular spiritual stance, I typically commit myself to that view of the
world as a proper response to how things really are. It would be possible, however,
to place a non-realist construction on the spiritual passions. On a non-realist view, in
committing myself to an attitude of cosmic trust, for example, I am constructing my
reality in a certain way, and then repudiating motivations and interpretations that are
contrary to it but I do not suppose that the stance I affirm is, or could be,
grounded in the way reality is. I answer the Euthyphro question the way Euthyphro
did not: reality is benign because I take it so, it is not that I take it as benign because
it is benign.
Some may approve of a non-realist spirituality as the ultimate in lonely heroism
although perhaps it need not be so lonely if a world that is fundamentally benign and
meaningful is a matter of collective, social, construction. Others will hold that a
genuine spirituality has to regard itself as a proper response to how the world is,
including how we are as agents in the world. This follows, it may be argued, because
it is fundamental to all wholesome spirituality to accept that the world is not ours to
construct, but that we live and move and have our being within a reality on which
we depend.7 But, in any case, it is clear that this realist feature is at least typical
and, importantly, not confined to specifically theist spirituality.
The realist feature does bring a difficulty with it, however. As already noted, there
is a question whether any particular spirituality is right spirituality, and so a question
whether the person who has it is justified in possessing it. Given the realist feature,
an issue of epistemic justifiability arises. If I possess the spirituality of cosmic trust,
for example, the question arises whether I am justified in my attitude that the world
is fundamentally benign justified, that is, with respect to the epistemic goal of
grasping the truth and avoiding error. If my spiritual attitude is to be a morally
admirable one, is it necessary that it also be epistemically virtuous?
If as I think they should realists reply in the affirmative, the debate between
evidentialists and fideists looms. Evidentialists hold that an epistemically virtuous
cognitive attitude must be adequately supported by the total available evidence,
while fideists allow that there can be exceptions to this evidential requirement, and
6

I here include amongst motivations interpretations of a situation, e.g. as one in which I am under threat,
or the centre of attention, etc.
7
This claim, it seems to me, is a good candidate for a belief with respect to which there can be no nonresistant non-belief: we all know in our heart of hearts that that this is true.

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J. Bishop

that the adoption of an overall framing attitude of the kind distinctive of the spiritual
belongs amongst the exceptions. One feature of that debate is important for our
purposes here, because it brings to light a further, sixth, feature of a Solomonian
grand spiritual passion.
Because of their role in framing ones overall experience of and engagement with
the world, spiritual attitudes could not in principle have their truth established from
an initially neutral standpoint on the basis of evidence in accordance with an
applicable objective (or, at least, intersubjective) evidential practice. This fact
features in the argument that aims to justify the adoption of such attitudes in
conscious recognition that they are not independently evidentially supported, and
that ones motivation for accepting them as true must be of a type other than being
exposed to compelling evidence. But a framing proposition, whose truth (or falsity)
could not in principle be settled from the outside on the evidence, functions in a
special way that as the logical positivists emphasised is quite different from the
way factual explanatory hypotheses function. The logical positivists were wrong, of
course, to infer that such propositions could not be genuine assertions. But, in the
general scramble to repudiate the errors and failures of the positivists, we have
perhaps lost sight of the fact that they were quite right to recognise that religious and
metaphysical and ethical claims amplify a scientific description of the world, and that
these amplifications are not capable in principle of being either verified or falsified
in relation to empirical evidence within the historical order.8 So a Solomonian
spiritual passion or, as I rather prefer to call it, a spiritual stance has the feature
that its cognitive content is an amplification of the view of the world achieved by
established natural science, or indeed of that view of the world ideally projected as
achieved by a completed natural science.
Thankfulness Without One to Whom Thanks Is Due?
So much, then, for anatomising Solomons notion of a grand spiritual passion. In the
remainder of this paper, I will consider further just how naturalist a genuine
spirituality can be, and I will do that in relation to the spiritual attitude of thankfulness.
One may find oneself visited with such an attitude. But one may regard it as
simply pathological, and wonder, perhaps, why one has it. In his lecture Dawkins
gave an evolutionary explanation of feelings of thankfulness for our existence. Many
animals are prone to vacuum activities continuing to exhibit fitness-enhancing
behavioural routines in contexts where those routines are pointless. (Dawkins gave
the sad example of a captive beaver, going through the motions of building an
imaginary dam with imaginary logs painstakingly piled into place.) The sense of
gratitude evoked by our reflection on our situation as evolved human animals is,
Dawkins suggests, a vacuum phenomenon. Our development as social animals
required a capacity for judging fairness, and for reckoning debts owed to us and by
us: and it is that capacity that free-wheels when we reflect on our evolutionary
origins, producing a sense of thankfulness for the existence that we have received.
8

This last qualification is intended to set to one side the possibility of post-mortem verification of claims
of this kind in some putative realm of existence transcending the spatio-temporal historical order.

Secular Spirituality and the Logic of Giving Thanks

531

This explanation is probably no more scientifically impressive than many other

just so evolutionary stories. But it does illustrate the possibility of explaining
feelings of thankfulness being grateful for existence, rather than simply gratified at
it without having to posit any object to which thanks are owed. Furthermore,
feelings of thankfulness need not be elevated into a Solomonian spirituality. Indeed,
someone like Dawkins might be expected to resist any such elevation and to
maintain a purely natural scientific worldview. Commitment to the natural scientific
worldview is, I take it, commitment to the claim that there is or, even, that there
can be no more to reality than would be described in an ideally complete natural
science. (Or, at least, that this is so as far as concrete reality is concerned: a rich
ontology of abstracta may be admitted without breaching scientific naturalism.)9
In fact, however, Dawkins recommended thankfulness for our existence. My
scientific naturalist colleagues who also heard the Dawkins lecture in Auckland were
irritated by this. They would have had no cause for irritation, however, had Dawkins
simply been expressing approval of the pathology of thankfulness for our existence.
But Dawkins gave the clear impression that he takes thankfulness to be a proper
response to reality, and even that this may be inferred from the chanciness of our
individual existences as understood from an evolutionary perspective. Anyone might
be irritated at the fallacy of the inference, of course: but it is the conclusion that
specially irritated the scientific naturalists, since taking thankfulness to be a proper
response to reality buys into a spiritual amplification of the scientific worldview. The
prophet of evolutionary naturalism, in his right mind, ought to go no further than to
observe that reflecting on the chanciness of our existence as resulting from lengthy
evolution is an occasion for pathological vacuum experiences of thankfulness, and
something that may be approved as enhancing human life.
But can one really wholeheartedly approve even celebrate a spiritual feeling
such as thankfulness for existence and remain securely within the bounds of
commitment to scientific naturalism?
Let me indulge in an anecdote. As an undergraduate at the Australian National
University, I was a member of Bruce Hall.10 In those days we had regular formal
meals with the Oxbridge conventions a High Table, gowns, and a Latin grace, as
follows:
Gratias agamas pro cibo atque sodalitate, nos qui in his aedibus Bruce
appellatis, studia ad majorem universitatis gloriam prosequimur.
(We would give thanks for food and fellowship, we who, in this hall called
Bruce, pursue our studies to the greater glory of the university.)
This grace came in time to seem somewhat comical, and the Deputy Warden took
to substituting an invocation in an African language when it was his turn to preside.
9

It is worth noting that, since there being no more to the real than would be known by an ideally
completed natural science is not itself a claim that could be established as a matter of natural scientific
fact, scientific naturalism itself amplifies reality-as-grasped-in-completed-natural-science. But it is a
minimal amplification the amplification you have to have in order to avoid amplifications.
10
This Hall of Residence, founded in 1961, was named in honour of Lord Bruce of Melbourne (Stanley
Melbourne Bruce), a notably Anglophile Prime Minister of Australia (from 1923-29), and first Chancellor
of the Australian National University.

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J. Bishop

Later I heard an account of how the grace had been adopted. Bruce Halls founding
Warden, the New Zealand geographer William Packard, felt that, though the Hall
was a secular foundation, there should be a grace at formal meals. So he asked the
classicist A.D. Trendall (also a New Zealander, then Master of University House) to
compose a secular Latin grace for Bruce Hall. The story is that Trendall thought the
notion of a secular grace a contradiction in terms and composed a spoof grace to
demonstrate what he took to be its absurdity (witness the reference to the greater
glory of the university!). Packard did not get the joke, however, and the grace was
instituted.
No doubt Packard sincerely believed that saying grace was a proper response to
the realities of our situation as a society of students and scholars. Contra Trendall, he
thought that saying grace made sense without any implied belief in God or anything
like it. But, if saying grace is the expression of an overall thankfulness for our
existence (and does not reduce to ritually thanking the cook, the food suppliers and
growers, etc., as clearly it does not), then it would appear to imply a Solomonian
spiritual passion and so pull us beyond the confines of scientific naturalism, even if,
perhaps, it does not get us all the way to God.
A distinction needs to be drawn, I think, between two ways of reading the claim
that a certain spiritual attitude such as overall thankfulness is a proper response
to reality.
In one sense, an epistemic sense, it is to say that thankfulness is what we ought to
feel in recognition of some feature of the real and, arguably, that feature must be a
really existing proper object of thanks. In a second sense, however, thankfulness
may be a proper response to reality just because it is a fact that having, adopting and
cultivating the spiritual passion of thankfulness is instrumentally useful in achieving
certain goals to which we are committed. A secular naturalist, then, might argue that
cultivating overall thankfulness for our lives brings us into good relationships with
each other and with the natural environment, and contributes to our overall
flourishing. The spirituality of thankfulness is then a proper response to reality
because there is something about how things are that makes the instrumental claim
true, but it has nothing to do with there actually existing anything like a God to be
the object of our overall thanks. Furthermore, taking thankfulness to be simply
instrumentally valuable seems to require going no further than approving the attitude
as a useful means to a worthwhile end, and acknowledging such instrumental value
does not trespass beyond a scientific naturalist worldview.
Now, one might think (as I am inclined to think) that there is an argument
from the instrumental value of having the thankfulness spiritual attitude to there
being something real that is to-be-thanked. And one might also think (again, as I
incline to) that this something real that is to-be-thanked will turn out to be the
God of theism, though that is by no means equivalent to the claim that it will turn
out to be the God of personal omniGod theism. I shall not fully develop or
attempt to assess these arguments here, but will close with brief remarks relating
to each.
It is important to consider what kind of a goal it is with respect to which having
and cultivating global spiritual attitudes such as thankfulness and trust may count as
instrumentally valuable. It will need, I think, to be a truly global goal. And
commitment to that goal will itself have to be justified as a proper response to reality.

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533

That goal can only be, I think, attaining ultimate fulfilment as the kinds of beings
that we are where ultimate fulfilment is ultimate in Aristotles sense of to teliotaton
(Nicomachean Ethics, Book I), a most final end for the sake of which other things
are sought, but which necessarily could not itself be sought for the sake of any
further end. If the spiritual attitudes are needed for ultimate fulfilment, and what it is
to be ultimately fulfilled is itself some kind of potentially concretely real state of
affairs, then I think it will follow that those attitudes must be properly responsive to
reality in the epistemic, and not just the instrumental sense. So the naturalist who
affirms the instrumental value of the spiritual attitudes will not in the end avoid a
view of reality that is amplified beyond that of scientific naturalism.
Naturalist accommodation of spirituality may thus fail for the strong grade of
naturalism scientific naturalism yet still be defensible. Solomons position
illustrates this. Solomon is not a scientific naturalist, since he allows that adoption of
the spiritual attitudes carries commitment to the world being concretely more than a
complete natural science holds it to be. Solomons spirituality is naturalist in the
sense that it is not supernaturalist it does not invoke anything beyond the natural,
historical, causal order.11 Solomons amplified natural world is a world in which fate
operates, where the notion of fate is tied to the notion of narrative significance.
Fate, Solomon says, is a teleological phenomenon, the ascription of purpose in
addition to the causal explanation of what has happened (2002, p. 100). To support
the spirituality of thankfulness, the operations of fate must support an ultimately
optimistic narrative. Such a narrative might be supported if fate is divine providence
and God is the personal omniGod though, of course, the force of the Argument
from Evil must be faced. But how else might an ultimately optimistic view be
supported? Solomon makes the intriguing remark that the notion of fate makes the
future more real, and that it is as if the salvation of the world is already settled and
it is just up to us to find the means (2002, pp 99-100). This suggests that an
ultimately optimistic spirituality might be defended by positing a world in which it is
not an external supernatural controller who ensures salvation but, rather, some real
state of the natural universe that realises the telos, the supreme good, for the sake of
which the universe exists. Though there is much in history that is decidedly
dysteleological, it may yet remain open to faith to venture to take this bold
teleological claim to be true. That, I suggest, is a good way to interpret what
Solomon here proposes, and that, I think, is also the core of a theist commitment.
Indeed though I grant that this claim needs a great deal more defence theistic
spirituality seems to me just to amount to this kind of teleological spirituality.12,13

11
It is important to recognise that a resolutely naturalist ontology is consistent with a worldview that
transcends scientific naturalism: everything that is may have a description that brings it within the domain
of science, and yet some emergent features of reality may be beyond any possible scientific explanation
or understanding.
12
I have made further remarks about taking the concept of God to be the concept of the ultimate telos in
Bishop 2007 and 2009.
13
Earlier versions of this paper were delivered at the 3rd Annual Conference of the Australasian
Philosophy of Religion Association, University of Melbourne, 17-18 July 2010, and at a research seminar
at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Waikato, 5 August, 2010. I am
grateful to audiences on both occasions for stimulating discussion.

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J. Bishop

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